with insufficient bone and sinew as also a want of requisite knowledge for the task.
It was then that many turned their backs upon the colony, quitting it for Sydney, Tasmania, and the Cape, where they freely denounced Swan River as sterile, unhealthy, and what not, though had the charge of unhealthiness been well founded, none but the malcontent refugees would have survived to give any account of it. It is true that many of the first immigrants died of scurvy, but the wonder is that the deaths from this cause were not far more numerous. Salt meat, which had been the principal diet on board ship, continued to be the bill of fare for many a long day after landing, and the colonists could not, of course, obtain fresh vegetables until they had sowed and grown them for themselves.
"We lived at one place for nearly two years," said one of our acquaintances, "before we knew that the ground would bear cabbages," and, under these circumstances, it did not surprise us to hear that when these cabbages came up, which had been experimentally sown, they were cut whilst only in the second leaf. Nor was this early cutting merely resorted to in order to satisfy the natural craving for green food, but sometimes also on account of veritable hunger. The ground had to be surveyed and cleared before it could be either ploughed or sowed, and long before the colonists ceased to depend upon imported corn they had twice suffered from the misery of famine. In a word, the recital of the hardships which had been undegone in those days by all who resolved to stick by the colony, or who had not the means of leaving it, excited
